Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 513Their cause became public on April 22d, 1970, also known as the first Earth
Day. What began as a small group meeting of volunteers grew unexpectedly
into nationwide mass rallies. Time magazine reported that Earth Day was “the
biggest street festival since the Japanese surrender in 1945.” Using the Civil
Rights Movement and the antiwar movement as examples on how to organize
a movement, people met in all major cities, sometimes in groups of over
25,000. More than 10 million Americans participated in teach-ins at over
10,000 schools and 2,000 colleges and universities throughout the country.
Earth day indeed kicked off the “environmental era” and pressured President
Nixon to respond to their demands, to regulate environmental quality rather
than just see the earth as one big commodity.
Nixon’s natural leaning was to support the industrial polluters and expand
American business. However, the environmental movement provided Nixon
with a political opportunity to take on a bipartisan issue of widespread public
concern. On January 1, 1970, Nixon signed the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA) and announced to the nation that the 1970s was to be the
“decade of the environment.” Environmental protection was a “now or
never” issue, Nixon even warned. The following month Nixon issued an
executive order to make all federal facilities reduce their pollution outputs. In
July, Nixon sent to Congress a plan to create the EPA, to reorganize the dif-
ferent federal programs into a single agency to protect the environment. The
EPA, intended to integrate scattered federal research attempts to deal with
pollution, went into operation by December of 1970 with some 6,000
employees. Although a good idea in theory, the new agency meant to deal
with environmental concerns remained fragmented and confusing. Rather
than reorganizing and reinvigorating programs, the EPA merely merged exist-
ing dysfunctional agencies into one department and never established an
overall mission or framework. Simply combining already broken programs
and agencies did not fix them.
However, the EPA did accomplish its goal of enforcing new pollution lim-
its set on industries. Within one year, the EPA sent 152 industrial pollution
cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. In 1971, the EPA won a
court order against Armco Steel, a major industrial polluter in Houston, Texas,
even though Armco attempted to buy off Nixon with large campaign contri-
butions. The EPA, during its first few years seemed to be doing well, and
seemed to reverse the government’s role of catering to the demands of busi-